Tantrika

by Asra Nomani

  Many mornings, a fifteen-year-old girl named Kulsum lingered when she came to sweep the floor in my bedroom. Nafees Apa had raised her since she was young, training her for her job as a maidservant and trying, as best she could, to teach her how to read and write. Kulsum was bright enough to say phrases like, “You are stupid!” to the bua, an elderly woman servent, in the kitchen and curious enough to follow me as I found photos of her favorite Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan, on the Internet. She had a fiery spirit not found in a lot of girls. One day she told me about her visits back to her village in the state of Karnataka, just across the border, where girls started to wear saris at the age of ten. She pranced around in shalwar kameezes and dared to ride her younger brother’s bike and talked with the quick yap that she had learned in the big city.

  “Is she a girl or a boy?” villagers asked about her. I’d heard that before, said about me.

  Another morning I read another story about a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl, Fareeda, whose parents sold her to a broker for five hundred rupees, about ten dollars, and the promise of a house, to be married to a Saudi. They thought her husband might be a Saudi sheikh. These sales were usually rackets for one-night stands where men from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States wed women in “temporary marriages.”

  I ventured into the narrow alleys of old Hyderabad to meet this girl with a local Muslim woman, Rehana Sultana, who was an attorney and advocate for Muslim girls and women. The lawyer ran a school trying to educate the local girls. She said the story of this bridal sale was common among families who saw no option other than making an income from their daughters. The fifteen-year-old girl lived in one room with her parents and eight brothers and sisters. Her father was feeble with tuberculosis and sat in the corner, keeping to himself. I talked to her about her journey to Bombay. She giggled about all the firsts she did—riding the train, watching TV, and eating food cooked for her.

  A Saudi saw her but rejected her. She was too dark skinned. Police raided the operation and returned her home.

  There were sacrifices of the female in so many forms. On the road the year before, I had read in the newspaper about a tigress named Saki who had lived in captivity in the Hyderabad zoo. One night culprits sneaked in and slaughtered her, some said for her blood, others said as part of a Tantric ritual. I went to the zoo one day to pay my respects. The Safari Park bus slipped through a gate that sat beside the cage where Saki had lived and died. The gate closed behind us. It reminded me of the maximum-security prison I’d visited in Minnesota to interview murderers who belonged to a bonsai club where they twisted and turned plants into the creations they wanted. Seeing how Saki was a captive in life and death made me sad, for such a fate could meet any one of our wild spirits if evil came our way.

  I had last visited Hyderabad for my brother’s wedding. There, I’d met for the first time the glorious blend of innocence, smiles, and kindness that made up my sister-in-law’s family.

  Her family still lived in the same narrow apartment flat above the Life Café that her father ran in a neighborhood of Hyderabad, Dilsukhnagr, which had become a busy bazaar with a rush of traffic outside. Sadly, Bhabi’s father had died suddenly earlier in the year from a stroke, leaving behind his widow and nine children, six daughters and three sons. The married daughters converged on the apartment when I visited, and I was engulfed in their sincerity, her brother dashing off to bring me back Cokes, her mother cooking my favorite foods, tamatar chutney, a tomato chutney, and kebab, and her sisters dressing me up as a bride to take photos on the roof. They were facing struggles to survive as a family after the death of their patriarch. As in most traditional families, Bhabi’s married sisters lived at their husbands’ houses with their in-laws. One of Bhabi’s sisters tearfully told me the tale of her domineering in-laws and rushed to watch a soap opera to try to learn how to assert herself at her husband’s house. Their father ran their house as an orthodox Muslim home, the girls and women behind a literal purdah, or curtain, through which they had to sneak peeks of the street downstairs. One night I taught one of Bhabi’s sisters how to use the Internet. She was smart enough to set up a Yahoo chat ID as “Sony,” not her real name.

  One afternoon we answered an advertisement for a possible bride for one of Bhabi’s brothers. Her parents advertised her as a twenty-two-year-old divorcee. “Her husband wasn’t a man,” the prospective bride’s aunt told my sister-in-law’s aunt over the phone.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. Nobody seemed to know for sure, but it was supposed to suggest the bride was still a virgin, although married.

  We went to a house that looked auspicious. It was painted soft pink with doors the kind of blue they used everywhere on the island of Santorins in Greece. We sat in the front room. The aunt looked plain and weary. Her husband had just gotten his U.S. visitor’s visa application rejected. Bhabi’s aunt asked to see the girl. She walked into the room. I was shocked. She was draped in a stop-sign red sari with gold fringe, and she looked more like a weary forty-year-old than a twenty-two-year-old maybe-virgin. It was all quite sad.

  One of Bhabi’s sisters sat down next to her, talking to her about her studies. There was nothing virginal about this bride. Even the red told us so. Another of Bhabi’s sisters asked to see the possible bride’s hair. I didn’t get it. Then she asked her to stand up so she could survey her height. She tried to look under the gold border of the sari.

  “Heels?” she asked.

  It reminded me of a slave auction. I felt sad.

  Not that I had any better alternatives. I was searching for love in a cyberworld where are is r, for is 4, and a “Paki boy” looks for a girl from Ireland, America, or France. I was searching the Yahoo personals.

  46. Looking for a sizzling hot female.

  Age: 25;

  arif515

  I am a smart and sexy male from Pakistan. I am not too practicing as far as religion is concerened. Out going activities and nice ladies attract me a lot. So if u want to enjoy a special relationship with me, come and lets have a try. u will love it…

  51. Seeking Friends & Love

  Age: 29; Pocono Pines

  jamilahmedbhatti

  It’s me Jamil Bhatti, Whom you look, you may not find me the best one but will find me a different one. I am Friendly & Frankly to every person who is a person indeed. Come-on you are being waited….

  56. Asian Boy seeks French/Amerincan/Ireland

  Age: 26; Jamaica

  momintariq

  HI, I am male/26 in Pakistan, I am looking for a sweet girl from France/American/ireland. if you are from any of these countries, please emai me, you can see my pictures….

  Khala often visited when I retreated upstairs to write, shuffling upstairs in sandals marked “Chips.” As I tried one morning to tug a bottle of hair oil out of her hands so I could rub the oil into her hair, I asked her, “Why not open your heart?”

  She gave me a playful smile and responded, “You should keep your heart closed.”

  I knew why she said this. We had to protect our hearts. The newspapers in India were filled with spiritual teachings, and one day, tucked between advice from tarot card readings, astrological horoscopes, and feng shui, I found an article that examined a book about desire by a man named J. Cornfield. He was actually Jack Kornfield, a popular Buddhist teacher in the West. He said there were two types of desire, skillful desire inspired by love, compassion, creativity, and wisdom and painful desire, which was defined by greed, grasping, inadequacy, and longing. I had painful desire down. He suggested following the advice of the shamans and Buddha and naming what we feared as a step toward gaining power over it.

  Buddha had done it, saying, “I know you, Mara,” to the god of darkness.

  I thought about this idea. I settled on calling the loneliness and despair that I felt and feared “Jungli Apa,” inspired by the wild parakeets of Jaigahan. I knew I wasn’t alone when I read an e-mail from Kirsten, the cook at the West Virginia forest monastery who had taught me death me
ditation as a way of bringing reality to expectations so that, conceivably, we can love with skillful desire. She was trying to apply this strategy in her latest relationship with the man who had invited her to vacation with him almost a year earlier while I was at the monastery. She admitted that it had been a painful relationship. She cried every day for four months because the relationship with her boyfriend wasn’t calm.

  The year before, I thought that maybe I would take a path alone in this world, having failed to find a romance in which to safely and fully love. But this year had shown me the lone path wasn’t easy. I wanted a supportive, fruitful, spiritual relationship in which I could create a family, children, an inspiration for myself and my husband. Maybe even a little Sunday sex. I was thinking, maybe, that I wanted to pursue an arranged marriage, modern style. One morning as Khala lay on her bed, I told her that I thought this world was too difficult to traverse alone. She listened quietly. I lay down on a bedroll below her, the ceiling fan whirring slowly above our heads. We both slept.

  I wrote most days until 1 P.M. when Kulsum called me for lunch. Then, it was azan for zohar prayer when supposedly anything you ask for is received. Then, a nap. I wrote for another hour, followed by asr, my favorite namaz, because it sounded so much like my name.

  Khala and I walked around the block at 6 P.M. She said prayers to keep a stray dog away from her. We were back for magrib azan at sunset. I sat. I wrote. Isha azan. Dinner. Sleep. The order was soothing. All the while, Choti Momani crocheted and Khala shuffled with her tasbi, pushing the beads with the edge of her fingers with every silent utterance. After a couple of weeks, I awakened at 5 A.M. feeling so strong and so full of energy it was as if God himself had touched me. The anxieties that plagued me had dissipated in the order of this home.

  “How did you get your strength?” I asked Choti Momani one afternoon as she crocheted. She and another aunt, named Bari Momani, meaning “elder aunt,” had raised two generations of children, educating them with matriarchal power in Panchgani, the boys for careers from Wall Street to London and the girls for successful marriages. She looked up at me and smiled. “From all of you. From the children. From God.” She told me that she left her worries with God when she prayed. I wondered aloud about her experience when she prayed.

  Khala snapped at me in her gentle way. “Stop thinking about things that happen in the mind when you pray. Just pray.”

  One morning, I didn’t come down for prayer. Khala said she came upstairs to check on me twice. I lay in bed, wondering how to find contentment in my love life. I hadn’t yet found the answer on this journey. Khala didn’t know what I was thinking about. But she knew that ruminations weren’t productive. “Sit wastefully, and wasteful thoughts come to you,” Khala told me. “The devil is always there to show you the wrong path.”

  I always lost my bearings after a relationship ended, the most recent being a dalliance with a man I’d met at the Maha Kumbh Mela, an American surfer living in Costa Rica. I had gone to Gujarat with him to an ashram, where I climbed great heights to a Tantric shrine in the Girnar Hills and wept at his departure, even though I actually was relieved to see him go. In my meditations at the ashram, I could feel the spirit of the women of my family and ancestry from whose destiny I was so different because of the sexual freedom I enjoyed. My mother said I gave so much of myself up in relationships. Lucy gave me the gift of clarity in an e-mail.

  “You must believe in your wings,” she wrote to me. “They will take you to beautiful places, but when the air gets stale, you must fly from those places where the currents pull you towards the rocks. Not avoidance, no, you need to leave with the winds of change. When those winds change and you have dealt with these emotions, then leave.”

  Her words took me back to cliffs upon which I had stood some years earlier in a corner of the island of Oahu in the state of Hawaii. I had hit the road without any plan with two Canadian journalists I had befriended at the Asian American Journalists Association conference. We turned down a road that led us to a rocky embankment, where a group of new friends who were U.S. Marines were enjoying their day off. They were bounding from the cliffs, screaming, “Geronimo!” with each leap.

  I looked down from the cliffs. It was a scary sight, the water seemed fifty yards below. Ever since an elementary school teacher made me jump off a diving board, to be engulfed in a rush of white water, I’d had a fear of the water, which I was always trying to overcome. My friend Lynn Hoverman, a California surfer girl whom I had befriended at the D.C. volleyball courts, literally held my hand one summer afternoon to teach me how to pounce into the Atlantic Ocean waves off Dewey Beach in Delaware. But one of the Marines, a woman, encouraged me and urged me to my own jumps off the cliffs. I loved the flight.

  As I sat in my room, I saw myself flying above those cliffs, a choice facing me to crash into the rocks or fly free into the ocean. In my mind, I changed the direction of my flight so that I flew toward the ocean, free.

  I was facing a philosophical dilemma. I had waited three months for Cheenie Bhai’s feathers to grow back, but they hadn’t. To continue to wait? Or to keep him caged? When I saw myself flying free, I knew that one day it was only right that he, too, should also fly free.

  I’d been in Hyderabad for weeks, but I’d avoided returning to that place that stored the deepest memories for me, the house where I’d lived for the first four years of my life, before leaving it and my grandparents to go to America.

  I went to the house on my last day in Hyderabad, slipping through the narrow roads of the old neighborhood. I ducked through a doorway and into a courtyard around which sat the rooms where we used to live. Everything was in ruins. A man stood on the roof with a pickax, dismantling what remained of the house. Dadi had sold the house when her sons convinced her to move to Pakistan, and now the house was being demolished. I stood in the courtyard, peeking into the dark rooms.

  “This is where you used to sleep,” the woman with me told me, gently. She was Zaheda Aunty, the wife of my father’s friend, Aftab Uncle, who went to the U.S. with my father, watching him read my mother’s letters late into the night. He had returned to Hyderabad and remained there, unlike my father. Rubble lay crumbled inside the rooms. I stood there and realized a deep truth: this was what yesterday’s difficult memories should be within me—ruins.

  I returned to Jaigahan. If I needed a sign that it was right for me to return, Jungli Apa gave it to me in the morning. She arrived on the branch of the bale tree.

  What an amazing thing. She had waited for us all these weeks that we were away? I didn’t see the other birds. I didn’t hear them either. She forgave the Cheenies their absence, it seemed. She didn’t sit with them on their cage as she did before. Now, Cheenie Apa’s cries pierced the air like the plaintive cry of a child departed from its mother. A mother departed from her child. The sweat poured down my forehead. I spent little time this stay with Bluebeard. I had exerted the energy to befriend him and now knew that he was a drain of energy. He had a destructive effect on everything around him.

  I came back to the village with a stabilizer custom-made by a Hyderabad manufacturer, the wiring assembled in a factory dominated by women with ginger fingers. My salesman was a gentle man who listened carefully to all of my instructions, a convert to Christianity who broke boundaries to marry a Hindu woman. He proudly brought my stabilizer with its functioning cutoff switch just before I left Hyderabad, wrapped snugly into a box.

  Shakti was finally flowing here at Latif Manzil without obstruction. I had done it.

  CHAPTER 21

  Out of Morgantown

  I MADE IT HOME for my guru’s tenth birthday. Safiyyah and Samir both took the day off school, and we explored through tall grass that led to a farm beside the new house my parents had bought. A white horse stood in a stable with rolling Appalachian hills behind him. It was beautiful to be home. Here I brought home what I had learned in the world. Here I absorbed the great lessons about life, love, and liberation.

  Th
e children were growing. Samir was eight. He remembered one day how he wanted to marry a girl in kindergarten, Shahira. “She helped me up when I fell,” Samir remembered, “and she taught me how to make S’s.” Life could be that complete.

  One afternoon, Samir’s ten-year-old friend Spencer visited my childhood home. “What do you think at night when you put your head to sleep?” I asked Spencer.

  “The kittens.” He, like me, was still consumed by Jaz’s litter, plus the kitten named Special. They’d been given away to families far-flung, and we missed them.

  Anything else?

  “Well, I knew that I liked this girl named Laurel because I started seeing her when I went to sleep at night.”

  How did he know he liked her?

  “She is as funny as me.” Love was as simple as that.

  “I love her, and she loves me.”

  I was home, peaceful in the land where shakti ran free and love was pure. I fell into the easy rhythms of Morgantown.

  Tuesdays, I was Lunch Lady, collecting tickets at the North Elementary cafeteria. Tuesday, September 11, transformed reality. My mother called me at home with the news of planes crashing into the World Trade Center. I didn’t believe her. Yahoo confirmed the truth.

  I walked down Headlee Avenue, the sun warming me, for one of the last moments of unadulterated innocence I was to enjoy. I whispered the news to Samir and Safiyyah, as mothers and fathers swept into the building to take their children home early. When I got them home, the reports started coming in from my mother at her boutique on High Street. Ali Baba, a restaurant with mosquito netting over a booth and hummus on the menu, shut down because of a suspected bomb threat that turned out to be a vulgar phone call. Two Muslim women wearing hijabs, the head scarves tightly wrapped around the hair, had them ripped off their heads at the West Virginia University student union with the shouts, “We’re going to get you!”